PPG-DG01 — Capitalism, Desire and the Politics of Control

Capitalism, Desire, and the Politics of Control

Course code: PPG-DG01   |   School: School of Public Policy and Governance   |   Cluster: Micropolitics and Contemporary Power   |   Level: 300 (Intermediate)

Public policy is often taught as the rational allocation of scarce resources through institutions, laws, incentives, and administrative programmes. This course adds a different and demanding question: how are needs, identities, aspirations, habits, and forms of obedience produced within contemporary capitalism? Drawing principally on the conceptual work associated with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, while connecting it to public-policy analysis, the course examines capitalism as more than an economic system. It is approached as a social machine that organises flows of labour, money, information, affect, attention, and desire.

The course does not ask learners to accept a philosophical vocabulary as doctrine. Concepts such as desiring-production, social machines, coding, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, molar and molecular politics, lines of flight, and societies of control are treated as analytical instruments. Students learn to define each concept precisely, compare it with conventional policy frameworks, apply it to empirical cases, and identify its limits. The aim is to cultivate critical policy intelligence rather than ideological repetition.

Across eight modules, learners investigate how institutions shape conduct, how markets capture creativity and dissatisfaction, how digital platforms reorganise surveillance and participation, and how apparently emancipatory movements can reproduce exclusion or become new markets. Cases may include platform labour, algorithmic welfare, consumer credit, urban redevelopment, health governance, education, social media, border control, and public-sector digitalisation. The course concludes with a public-policy case analysis that combines conceptual depth, empirical evidence, stakeholder consequences, and actionable safeguards.

Who This Course Is For

PPG-DG01 is designed for policy professionals, researchers, graduate-level learners, public administrators, civil-society practitioners, journalists, educators, and institutional leaders concerned with contemporary power. It is especially relevant to participants studying political economy, governance, digital society, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, or public administration. Prior knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari is helpful but not required; all specialised concepts are introduced through guided application.

Learning Outcomes

By completing this course, learners will be able to:

• Explain capitalism as an economic arrangement and as a social machine that organises conduct, meaning, and desire.
• Distinguish individual preference from the social production of desire without denying personal agency.
• Analyse coding, decoding, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization in concrete institutional settings.
• Differentiate molar structures from molecular processes and use both levels in policy analysis.
• Evaluate disciplinary institutions and contemporary mechanisms of modulation, datafication, and control.
• Assess how resistance, innovation, and lines of flight may generate possibility while also producing new risks.
• Identify distributional, ethical, legal, and democratic consequences of policies that shape behaviour.
• Produce a rigorous public-policy case analysis supported by evidence and a defensible intervention design.

Course Structure

Module 1 — From Economic Critique to Psychopolitics

The opening module moves beyond a narrow understanding of capitalism as exchange and ownership. Learners examine how institutions and markets organise attention, aspiration, anxiety, and self-understanding. The module introduces the problem of governing subjects who appear free while their fields of choice are actively structured.

Module 2 — Social Machines and Desiring-Production

This module introduces desire as productive rather than simply a private lack. Families, schools, workplaces, media, platforms, and bureaucracies connect bodies, rules, signs, and material resources. Learners create a social-machine map that traces how a public problem is produced and maintained across institutional relations.

Module 3 — Coding, Decoding, and Capital

Societies organise flows through codes, norms, classifications, credentials, prices, and legal categories. Capitalism simultaneously decodes established arrangements and recaptures activity through money, debt, measurement, and markets. Learners analyse how a policy classification enables administration while also excluding or simplifying lived realities.

Module 4 — Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

Capital, technology, migration, and reform can loosen established relations, but disruption is normally followed by new boundaries, dependencies, and controls. This module teaches learners to identify both movements in policy change. A reform may increase flexibility while creating platform dependence; digital access may expand services while concentrating data power.

Module 5 — Molar and Molecular Politics

Molar politics concerns visible institutions, laws, classes, organisations, and identities. Molecular politics operates through everyday habits, affects, language, informal norms, and small interactions. Effective policy analysis must connect both. Formal equality may coexist with molecular practices that reproduce stigma, fear, or exclusion.

Module 6 — Institutions and Control

This module compares enclosed disciplinary institutions with more continuous forms of control based on access, scoring, tracking, incentives, and real-time modification. Learners examine digital identity, algorithmic decision systems, performance dashboards, and platform governance, asking how accountability can be preserved when power is distributed across code, vendors, data, and administrative routines.

Module 7 — Lines of Flight and Their Risks

A line of flight is a movement that escapes an established arrangement and opens another possibility. Yet escape is not automatically emancipatory. It can produce precarity, violence, capture, or new markets. Learners assess innovations and social movements through a dual lens: what possibilities are created, and what safeguards are needed?

Module 8 — Public-Policy Case Analysis

The capstone integrates philosophical concepts with professional policy reasoning. Learners select a concrete case, define the decision context, map social and desiring machines, analyse molar and molecular power, identify processes of control and resistance, and propose an intervention with legal, ethical, participatory, and evaluative safeguards.

Learning Method and AI Laboratory Prototypes

Every module includes a prototype task: a desire-and-institution map, social-machine diagram, coding audit, territorial transformation map, molar–molecular matrix, control architecture diagnostic, line-of-flight risk review, or final policy case dossier. These are working analytical artefacts, not decorative summaries. Where the KBA13 AI Laboratory is enabled, enrolled participants may use category-linked tools to compare interpretations, organise evidence, generate counterarguments, and test policy assumptions.

AI output must never be treated as an authoritative account of a community, philosopher, law, or empirical case. Learners must verify claims, cite traceable sources, protect confidential information, and disclose significant AI assistance. Prototype access is intended to be restricted by Tutor LMS enrolment so that public visitors can view the overview while course activities and learner work remain protected.

Assessment

• Module prototype portfolio — 30%: eight progressive analytical artefacts demonstrating conceptual accuracy and application.
• Conceptual comparison essay — 20%: critical comparison between course concepts and a conventional policy framework.
• Institution and control diagnostic — 20%: evidence, stakeholder analysis, accountability, and ethical safeguards.
• Final public-policy case dossier — 30%: integration, originality, empirical quality, feasibility, and professional communication.

Academic quality requires accurate definition, charitable interpretation, empirical verification, acknowledgement of disagreement, and transparent reasoning. Learners must avoid using theoretical language as a substitute for evidence. Strong work shows what a concept reveals, what it obscures, and how its use changes a policy decision.

Capstone Deliverable

The final dossier should include an executive summary, case history, decision mandate, stakeholder and rights-holder map, political-economic context, social-machine diagram, analysis of desire and subject formation, coding and territorial processes, molar–molecular dynamics, control architecture, potential lines of flight, risk and ethics review, intervention options, implementation responsibilities, and indicators for evaluation. The result should be suitable for discussion in a ministry, university, public agency, advocacy organisation, or research setting.

Certificate and Completion

Learners receive a Tutor LMS Pro certificate of completion after meeting the platform requirements and submitting required work. Where Gradebook is enabled, assessed activities contribute to the recorded result. Completion represents engagement with all eight sessions and the capstone standard; it should not be awarded merely for opening lesson pages.

KBA13 Academy principle: Critical theory becomes valuable to public policy when it improves our ability to recognise power, protect dignity, examine unintended consequences, and design institutions that remain open to democratic challenge.